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Forgotten Heritage: Exploring Italy's Abandoned Castles, Towers and Hospitals

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article-imageInside an industrial tower in Northern Italy, looking straight down to the base of the tower to looking up slightly to the central skylight. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

As the man behind the camera at Forgotten Heritage Photography, Matt Emmett has ventured into abandoned buildings of every stripe: long-shuttered mills, subterranean cisterns, and rust-encrusted power stations, in his native UK and beyond. Guided by a mission to capture the aesthetics, character, and history of each building, Emmett's work reveals the often stunning sights that lie beyond the chain-link fences and "No Trespassing" signs. 

Emmett recently traveled to Italy to explore abandoned sites. Here is what he found—all photo captions are straight from his descriptions of each place.

Atlas Obscura: What made you choose Italy to explore?
Matt Emmett: There were quite a few abandoned locations I had been itching to shoot over there for a quite some time. A few photographers I knew had recently done a trip to Italy and the resulting images pushed me into action. Italy has a nice mix of crumbling villas, chapels and asylums, contrasted with some good quality, large scale industrial plants.

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 A spiral staircase in an abandoned castle in Northern Italy. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

Which parts of the country did you visit?
The trip started in the Florence area for the first day, moved onto the Bologna / Ferrara area and then the last two days were spent further north in the countryside around the Torino area. The locations are usually found outside of the cities themselves and so you don't get to experience the normal sightseeing spots. Personally speaking, not sharing a beautiful and atmospheric location with thousands of other people is infinitely preferable.

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The broken remains of what was once the private chapel of a grand residence in rural Italy. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

What were you most looking forward to seeing? How did it compare to your expectations?
There is a large manicomio (psychiatric hospital) in a small northern town that has been closed since 1981. A large three storey building situated around two large open courtyards (one each for male and female patients) surrounded by patient wings, medical suites and administration blocks. The interior is incredibly beautiful with light drenched corridors, crumbling plaster, peeling paint and much foliage growing up the walls and in through windows. Much of the medical equipment, like the dental and ECT suites are still in-situ. From a photographic point of view, there are a lot of shots inside and it did not disappoint. We spent over four hours inside and could have spent much longer but the next location was calling us.

 article-imageRow upon row of wooden cupboards in an abandoned asylum. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

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Medical suite equipment left behind in an abandoned asylum. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

article-image  Open air inner quadrangles in a large ex-psychiatric hospital in Northern Italy. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

What surprised you?
Just how much more beautiful the locations were once I was there, finally standing within the images I had seen online, that's always quite a cool moment, almost a kind of pilgrimage.

What was the process of getting access like?
In most cases the buildings are fairly easily accessed, but only if you have prior knowledge of where the way in is. Sometimes a little climbing is involved or a crawl along a pipe run in a basement. For the important locations you really don't want to miss it's often wise to go in just before dawn.

article-imageThe view from an abandoned Villa across a town in Northern Italy. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

Any run-ins with the law?
No difficulties or run-ins with official law enforcement but we did get trapped in a location whilst we hid from a security team that obviously knew we were there. They swept the large building four times whilst we hunkered down in a dark attic space to wait it out. At one point someone climbed the steps to the hatch and lit up the attic with a torch whilst we pressed up tight behind several brick support pillars. We were inside the attic for over four hours! Exciting and scary all at once.

Which was the most interesting abandoned location to explore, and why?
A large ex-Casino complex that was isolated way out in a rural location in Northern Italy. The surrounding gardens and mood that hung over the place was fantastic, we arrived on a warm day with bright blue cloudless skies overhead, it was very still and quiet besides the constant sound of cicadas drifting in the windows as we shot, magical! I had only seen one shot that I could remember and once inside we discovered that it was actually a gold mine for photography. Storage areas, kitchens, beautiful corridors, a small chapel, a grand staircase and ornate wood panelled rooms. A very beautiful but surprisingly rich site compared with what I thought I knew of it prior to arriving.

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A grand double staircase in an abandoned ex casino complex. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

What's next on the exploration list?
I regularly have things going on in the UK and northern Europe, but I plan on doing some shoots in the US at some point, in the Denver area to start me off. Some ghost towns in the mountains and a few other places I have heard about from a US contact.

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The exterior of the industrial tower. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

article-imageFoliage encases a barred window in the old asylum building in Northern Italy. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

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A fresco-adorned room within an abandoned castle. (Photo: Forgotten Heritage Photography)

Find more of Matt’s photos of abandoned sites at the Forgotten Heritage Facebook page, Twitter account, and on forgottenheritage.co.uk.









From Junk to Genius: 5 Found Art Meccas You Can Visit on Obscura Day

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Austin's Cathedral of Junk (Photo: alamosbasement on Flickr)

Who needs hoighty-toighty museums and snotty art dealers to tell a creator what is beautiful? All across America artists have put aside all fears to make pieces of art that are overtly unique to them. One of the favorite mediums for these artists is so-called junk, everyday objects that have seemingly outlived their usefulness, becoming as-they-say, one man's trash. This May 30th, as part of Obscura Day, our worldwide celebration of the world's wonders, we are hosting events at five of the most incredible found art displays in the U.S. Call it "naive art," "outsider art," or even "junk," just don't call it uninspired.


1. NOAH PURIFOY'S OUTDOOR DESERT ART MUSEUM
Joshua Tree, California

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Who says independent artists are off the rails?  (Photo: Christopher Michel on Flickr)

A wide majority of naive art displays and make-shift galleries are the idiosyncratic work of a single creator, and Noah Purifoy's desert collection is no different. Set on over seven acres of arid land, Purifoy's creations tend toward the more grandiose, with the sculptures taking the form of almost architectural workings. Using everything from old tires and burnt scraps of wood to dead computers and cast-off hamburger wrappers, the collection of pieces large and small have been growing since the first one was assembled in 1989. Today the installations are still kept up by the Noah Purifoy Foundation, although the natural climate continues to slightly alter the works, bringing them closer to their natural surrounds with each year.       

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Dream fortress. (Photo: Jack McGee on Flickr)

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Egyptian obelisks, eat your heart out. (Photo: Channone Arif on Flickr)


2. HOUSE OF BALLS
Minneapolis, Minnesota

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A king in his kingdom. (Photo property of House of Balls)

While there aren't an abundance of spheres in Minneapolis sculptor Allen Christian's homegrown gallery, it has no shortage of balls. Started almost 30 years ago under Christian's stated mission statement that, "we all possess the creative impulse and we owe ourselves the balls to express it." Thus the House of Balls was born. With pipes and typewriter parts and old teeth anything else Christian feels that he can breath some life into. In addition to the eclectic sculptures and static works, there are also all manner of janky automaton that will come to life at the push of a button. It takes more than talent and drive to create strange works like thos of Allen Christian, it takes balls.

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It could be said that this piece of art is relaxing. (Photo: Allen Christian on Atlas Obscura)

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Even the truck has balls. (Photo: Alan Turkus on Flickr)


3. THE MUSEUM OF WONDER
Seale, Alabama

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Inventory at the museum is a bit of a nightmare. (Photo property of The Museum of Wonder)

Alabama artist Butch Anthony's Museum of Wonder is closer to a museum of artifacts than an art gallery, it nonetheless finds the beauty hidden in what some might consider trash. With mounted bones, sticks, and rusting bits of hardware, Anthony's cabin-bound collection celebrates the singular wonder that can be found in the discarded and forgotten bits. In addition to highlighting a cornucopia of found items, Anthony displays his signature artistic style which often sees him tracing impressionistic bones over paintings and portraits. Whether its found or made, the items in the Museum of Wonder rarely fail to inspire just that.   

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Dem bones. (Photo property of The Museum of Wonder)


4. CATHEDRAL OF JUNK
Austin, Texas

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Ah, Trash Vegas, where everyone bets on junk and everyone wins. (Photo by Jennifer Morrow on Wikipedia)

Kneel and pray before the homemade church of trash! Built in the backyard of Austin, Texas artist Vince Hannemann, the Cathedral of Junk is an ever-evolving holy site devoted to the lost and found. Believed to now contain around 60 tons of junk, the shaggy structure began life in 1989 as Hannemann began collecting various pieces of junk that he would then add to the ever growing pile in his backyard. Soon the cacophonous tower began to take shape, and has continued to grow and evolve ever since. While it looks as though it is held together, possibly literally with spit and bailing wire, the structure had has actually been tested by city engineers who have deemed it safe enough to remain. It is occasionally available for event rentals as well, with some couples even choosing it as the site for their wedding.   

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The (sort of) iron throne. (Photo by Aleksandr Zykov on Flickr)

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A tower reaching towards heaven. (Photo by That Other Paper on Flickr)


5. PORTER SCULPTURE PARK
Montrose, South Dakota

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Puff the Kind-of-Terrifying Scrap Dragon (Photo: Dave Ginsberg on Flickr)

Many found art and sculpture parks and gardens seem to revel in a cute whimsy, Montrose, South Dakota's Porter Sculpture Park is not afraid to embrace its darker aspects. Created by farmer-turned-sculptor Wayne Porter, the collection is comprised of creatures and figures welded together out of old scrap metal and farm equipment. While there are some animals and bugs that would seem almost cuddly if they weren't crafted out of sharp steel, there are also a large number of more disturbing pieces like the massive bull's head that is flanked by skeletal minotaur guardians, and a sinister jack-in-the-box that appears to be crying blood. Many of these creatures can be seen from the nearby highway, looking to the unfamiliar like some, possibly malevolent, fairy field.       

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Just another peaceful sculpture garden from hell. (Photo: Robin Davies on Flickr)

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Monkey business. (Photo: Eli Duke on Flickr)








Head Space: Behind 10,000 Years of Artificial Cranial Modification

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Deliberate modification of the skull, also called the "Toulouse deformity." (Photo: Didier Descouens/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

In 2013, archaeologists working in Alsace, in eastern France, uncovered something incongruous, and to the untrained eye, very strange. The researchers discovered the tomb and skull of an aristocrat, who died some 1,600 years ago. Her skull was heavily deformed, with the front flattened, and the rear rising into a cone shape. An amateur digger might have been forgiven for thinking they had found one of the “Grey aliens” that UFO-spotters regularly claim to see. 

This was an example of “artificial cranial deformation,” or in layman’s terms, the practice of altering the head’s natural shape through force. As odd as it seems, this was not a singular incident, or only representative of fifth-century practices, or something that only happened in France. Until the early 1900s, a form of artificial cranial deformation was still taking place in Western France, in Deux-Sevres. Known as the Toulouse deformity, the practice of bandeauwas common amongst the French peasantry. A baby's head would be tightly bound and padded, to protect it from accidental impacts. At around the same time, the practice was still occurring in Russia and the Caucasus, as well as in Scandinavia. 

It turns out that altering the shape of one's head is not shockingly unique; it's incredibly common, across time and geography. Its meaning isn't fixed, so understanding why and how it happens can reveal much about the societies who choose to change the shape of their heads.


Originally, head flattening was instituted to "distinguish certain groups of people from others and to indicate the social status of individuals." In Europe the practice was most popular with tribes that emigrated from the Caucasus region of Central Asia, like the Huns, Sarmatians, Avars, and the Alans. Indeed, that region is where the remains of the earliest suspected practitioners of artificial cranial deformation were discovered.

While early European observers of the practice in France and in Eastern Europe reportedly pitied children whose heads had been bound, subsequent research has led experts to believe that cranial modification has no impact on cognitive function, nor is there a difference in cranial capacity. According to a 2007 paper in the journal Neurosurgery,“there does not seem to be any evidence of negative effect on the societies that have practiced even very severe forms of intentional cranial deformation." 

article-image (Photo: Didier Descouens/WikiCommons CC SA 3.0)

In Iraqi Kurdistan, near the borders with Iran and Turkey, a cemetery from the proto-Neolithic period was discovered in 1960. The site, called Shanidar Cave, dates back more than ten thousand years, and contains the bodies of 35 individuals, including some of the first examples of intentional skull shaping. The Huns and Alans both seem to have originated in Central Asia, and as they pushed westward into the Roman Empire (often invited as mercenaries), their practice of head binding came with them, and was adopted by some peoples living in Western and Central Europe.  

The earliest written reference we have of artificial cranial deformation comes from Hesiod, a Greek poet who lived between 750 and 650 B.C. In his book of mythology, The Catalogues of Women, Hesiod referred to a tribe from either Africa or India called the “Makrokephaloi” (or “Macrocephali”), which roughly translates to “the big heads.”

Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, also mentions the Macrocephali in his work, On Airs, Waters, and Places, which was written around 400 B.C. Not only did Hippocrates mention the Macrocephali, but he got their techniques right. Rather than making the people mythological, Hippocrates tells us their methods, and their reasons: "They think those the most noble who have the longest heads . . . after the child is born, and while its head is still tender, they fashion it with their hands, and constrain it to assume a lengthened shape by applying bandages and other suitable contrivances . . ."

And it is not only European authors who found the practice amazing. Xuanzang, a Chinese Buddhist monk and traveller, whose 17-year journey to India inspired the Chinese classical novel Journey to the West, reported on the form of the practice he came across in modern-day Xinjiang, in Western China. Xuanzang speaks of the people of Kashgar, where "children born of common parents have their heads flattened by the pressure of wooden boards . . ."  

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(Photo: Tropenmuseum/ Royal Tropical Institute/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Thus, this woman discovered in France fits into a broader cultural narrative—one of migration, of high rank and social status, and of conquest. While it would be easy to write the practice off as being an odd thing that was popular thousands of years ago, it wouldn't be anywhere near the truth.

Across the Americas, in various tribes, infants had their heads bound and shaped by their parents. Both the Mayans and the Inca shaped their children's skulls, as did the Choctaw and the Chinookan tribes in what is now the United States. Their reasons must have been the same, to allow for the child to fit into the fabric of their societies, and to signify class. For the Maya, it also held a religious significance.

According to Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, a Spanish chronicler of the conquest of the Americas, a Mayan explained: "This is done because our ancestors were told by the gods that if our heads were thus formed we should appear noble . . ." 

Two different styles of artificial cranial deformation were prevalent in Mayan culture, and indicated the wearer’s rank. Those who were destined (or hoped) to hold some position of high status, were given what is referred to as “oblique deformations,” which resulted in a high, pointed head shape. However, the general populace could only use an “erect deformation,” which led to a rounded skull shape, with flattening on the sides. Whether these shapes were in imitation of a jaguar's skull, to show prowess, or in the shape of the maize god, to symbolise fertility, is a matter of debate among historians and archaeologists. 

article-imageParacas skulls on display at Museo Regional de Ica in the city of Ica in Peru (Photo: Martin Tlustochowicz/Wiki Commons CC BY 2.0)

Artificial cranial deformation was also recorded amongst the remains of people as far distant as Australia and the Caribbean islands. But it's not just an ancient practice. It still occurs in some of the world’s more remote outposts.

In Polynesia, the tradition still (rarely) occurs, as it does in the people of Mangbetu tribe, of Congo. In Vanuatu, the shape is associated with famous folk heroes and religion. A person from Malekula, an island in the Vanuatu chain, told the veteran anthropologist Kirk Huffman: “it originates with the basic spiritual beliefs of our people. We see that those with elongated heads are more handsome or beautiful, and such long heads also indicate wisdom."

More than a millennia after she died, the ancient aristocratic woman discovered in Alsace isn't alone. Like any body modification, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. She still has people whose cultures revere the same head-shape and customs as her own. 

 article-image(Photo: Wellcome Images, London)








The Most Unlikely Man to Influence A Generation of Writers: Walking Stewart

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An etchng of Stewart from this 1822 biography 'The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Walking Stewart' (Photo: Public Domain)

In their time, the English Romantics were known as a motley crew of libertines and dope-fiends. Percy Shelley was expelled from Oxford for an essay defending atheism, Samuel-Taylor Coleridge spent most of his life strung out on opium and Lord Byron (who was first deemed “mad, bad and dangerous to know” by his lover, Lady Caroline Lamb) died while fighting for Greek independence.

Like the multifaceted characters in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, their lives wavered between moments of heroism and scandal. In her diary,  discovered in 2010, Claire Claremont, a lover of both Byron and Shelley calls the men, “monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery.” 

But who influenced this oddball generation of writers, who produced works of literature like The Rime of The Ancient Mariner and Frankenstein? Their irrational behavior was partially a rational reaction to the industrialism that were ushered in by the Enlightenment era. The Romantics sought the sublime in everything: praising spirit, nature and the classical past with impassioned poetry and prose. And sometimes they found the sublime in a person, as was the case with their least-known, most-unexpected influence—a half-mad Englishman named John “Walking” Stewart.

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William Wordsworth in 1798 (above) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (below), who co-wrote 'The Lyrical Ballads'. (Photo: Public Domain)

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Photo: Public Domain

 

Walking Stewart redefined eccentricity. Something like a cross between Jack Sparrow and Dumbledore, Stewart had the gift of gab and a bohemian fashion sense (he preferred dressing in raggedy “Armenian”garb, which mainly consisted of military accessories that he’d acquired in his wanderings). According to his biographers, Stewart walked across continents, venturing as far Tibet and Arabia. His geographical expertise even earned him entrance into the Royal Society. Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of An English Opium-Eater, was so impressed by the man that he wrote an article about him which was published in The London Magazine in 1823. Some parts read like an eulogy for the greatest explorer of all time:

“His mind was a mirror of the sentient universe.--The whole mighty vision that had fleeted before his eyes in this world,--the armies of Hyder-Ali and his son with oriental and barbaric pageantry,--the civic grandeur of England, the great deserts of Asia and America,--the vast capitals of Europe,--London with its eternal agitations, the ceaseless ebb and flow of its 'mighty heart,'--Paris shaken by the fierce torments of revolutionary convulsions, the silence of Lapland, and the solitary forests of Canada, with the swarming life of the torrid zone, together with innumerable recollections of individual joy and sorrow, that he had participated by sympathy-- …I however, who am perhaps the person best qualified to speak of him, must pronounce him to have been a man of great genius; and, with reference to his conversation, of great eloquence.”

The full account of Stewart’s life is no less extraordinary. His adventures kicked off in 1753 when, at the age of 14, he joined the British East India Company as a clerk in Madras, India. After he left the company in 1765, he was captured by Sultan Hyder Ali and forced to work as an interpreter and soldier in Mysore. When the sultan, suspecting that Stewart would try to leave the kingdom attempted to have him assassinated, Stewart fled to Arcot, where took up residence with Muhammad Ali Khan Walla Jah, an associate of the British East India Company. Stewart was employed by the noble until he saved up £3000. At this point, according to “a Relative,” he:

 “…took leave of India, and travelled over near the whole of Persia and Turkey on  foot; rarely allowing himself the indulgence of a horse or caravan…”

By the time he arrived in Europe in the 1770s, Stewart had developed into a full-blown free spirit and vegetarian. Stewart’s spiritual philosophy was one of "feeling" materialism; he denied the soul’s existence, but he believed that atoms could be sentient without having any level of memory-based cognition. In Paris, between 1790 and 1792, Stewart made a strong impression on the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, then in his twenties. Wordsworth, who would eventually express a similar naturalistic philosophy in his writings, went on to become become one of the leading members of the first generation of Romantics, co-writing The Lyrical Ballads with his friend Samuel-Taylor Coleridge in 1798.

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A painting of Fort St George in Madras (Chennai) by Jan Van Ryne, 1754, one year after Walking Stewart joined the British East India Company (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

At the turn of the century in London, Stewart hung out in coffee rooms near Piccadilly and meditated in St. James Park. He lived a spartan lifestyle until he was awarded at least £10,000 in unpaid salary from the East India company. With his newfound affluence, Stewart established his own “Epicurean apartment” on Cockspur Street, where he hosted fancy dinners and entertained guests with conversation. Although the self-acknowledged sage wanted to be remembered and revered for his teachings, he grew increasingly skeptical about society’s future. Henry Salt, writing in an 1849 essay writes:

“He seems to have been haunted by a constant dread of some great and world-wide revolution, some ‘universal empire of revolutionary police terror,’ which would ‘bestialize the human species and desolate the earth.’”

 Stewart’s solution to the coming Apocalypse was simple: People needed to create secret societies of book lore:

 “…he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their  death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus, if the truth was not to be dispersed for many ages, yet the knowledge that here and there the truth lay buried on this and that continent, in secret spots on Mount Caucasus--in the sands of Biledulgerid-- and in hiding-places amongst the forests of America, and was to rise again in some distant age and to vegetate and fructify for the universal benefit of man…”

article-imageAn engraving of Queen's Palace, St James's Park, in 1810, where Walking Stewart was said to meditate (Photo: Public Domain)

It’s not known whether Stewart went forward with his literary time capsule project before his death in 1821, but at the very least, his itinerant and cosmopolitan lifestyle may have had some effect on the early Romantic movement in England. Many members of the second generation (Shelley, Byron) probably never met him, but they lived like him, wandering across Europe and rebelling against Western social norms. Like Stewart, their actions were impulsive and heartfelt, and their works helped to inspire Gothic writers such as Edgar Allen Poe and Aesthetes like Oscar Wilde. 

 








FOUND: 9 Mysterious, Well-Preserved Brains

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Five of the nine brains (Image: Facebook, via North County News)

In the town of Gouverneur, New York, not so far from the Canadian border, a local was out walking her dogs when she found nine brains, North Country Now reports.

They were thrown out onto the street. According to a veterinarian who examined the brains, they had been removed from whatever skulls they came from quite cleanly.

The big question: what sort of skulls did they come from?

The veterinarian weighed the brains, and he judges that at 70 grams—about one-sixth of a pound—they likely came from a dog about the size of a beagle. But another brain expert looked at the picture and declared that “they look more like sheep brains to me.”

Dog or sheep, the brains most likely served some sort of educational purpose. (That’s what everyone wants to believe, at least.) And as weird as this might seem, the Associated Press seeks to reassure: “Mishaps with preserved brains are not uncommon."

Bonus finds: A 21-year-old message in a bottlefive missing cowsa giant carrot

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 








The Gilded Age's Only Female Tycoon Lived in Brooklyn To Avoid Taxes

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article-image(Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Hetty Green, the newspapers said, was the richest woman in America.

She had so much money that by 1906, when she loaned New York City $2.5 million at the rather decent rate of five percent interest, she had become the city's "largest money lender,"theLos Angeles Herald reported. That wasn't the first time she'd stepped in to tide New York over (in 1898, she had given the city $1 million, at two-percent interest, for a four month bond) nor the last—in the 1908 financial crisis, she'd be there again, ready to lend to the city money.

As often as she helped the city through financial tough spots, though, Hetty Green never officially lived there. Long before it was cool or respectable, especially for New York's elite, Hetty Green lived in Brooklyn.

In the Gilded Age, when fortunes were being made and flaunted, Green stood out in two ways: she was a woman—the only notable female financier of her time—and she didn't like spending her money. In her 20s, she had inherited more than $5 million of the money that her Quaker father had made in whaling; when she died in 1916, she left more than $100 million. In today's dollars, she would have been a billionaire. She made her money in railroads and real estate (at one point she owned large swaths of Chicago), and she was fanatical about not spending it, so much so that the Guinness Book of World Records named her "World's Greatest Miser."

Green was famous for her frugality but jealous of her privacy, partially because she resented reporters for telling tall tales about her and partially because she was paranoid. (She worried she might be assassinated.) She also had a reputation for meanness: she allegedly pushed her aunt's favorite maid down the stairs, and it was rumored that when her son's leg was injured, she took him to a free clinic, meant for people who couldn't pay doctors. In her biography of Green, the writer Janet Wallach takes pains to argue that Hetty's eccentricities were much maligned and exaggerated, mostly because she was a woman—that if she had been a rich man who dressed plainly and tried to save money, no one would have made much of it. But whatever the reason, Green's actual life was not as clearly documented as her finances, making it hard to tease out which rumors about her are real and which are exaggerations.

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(Photo: Library of Congress 

It is certainly true, however, that after she and her husband separated and she moved to New York from their home in Vermont, Hetty Green did not do what most millionaires would have—buy a mansion on Fifth Avenue or some other tony area of the city. Instead, she lived in inexpensive hotels and boarding houses in Brooklyn, usually under assumed names, and paid $23 to $60 per month—that's somewhere between $600 and $1,500 in today's dollars and far less than she could have afforded, had she wanted to spend more. It's as if Michael Bloomberg decided to live Ridgewood, Queens, to save money.

Green commuted daily to a desk at the downtown Manhattan bank that held her money and securities, and initially she favored Brooklyn Heights. "She has a modest room in a comfortable boarding house on Pierrepont Street, and lives in a quiet, unpretentious manner," the Brooklyn Eagle reported, according to Wallach. Later, Green moved to Hotel St. George, on Pineapple Street, and for a while lived on Henry Street. She usually took public transportation downtown, and, as the Eagle wrote in 1893, most of the middle class people who passed her on Brooklyn's streets had no idea she was one of the world's richest women.

Green's preference for Brooklyn, though, was a way to save money—and not just on rent. Much like today's wealthiest people, Green preferred not to pay New York City's high taxes, and she moved around in order to avoid establishing residency in any one place. Her attachment to Brooklyn lasted only as long as the tax advantage did: in 1898, when the five boroughs became one city, Hetty Green left Brooklyn for Hoboken. 

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Illustration from an 1895 issue of Puck magazine, showing Hetty Green, Russell Sage and George J. Gould standing in line and crying as they pass their income tax checks  next to a notice that states "Pay Your Income Tax Here - No Escape for Millionaire Tax-Dodgers". (Photo: Library of Congress)

Even in New Jersey, though, Green moved frequently (in part to avoid the press). Only once in her life did she really make a concession to society's expectations for a rich woman: when her daughter, Sylvia, was becoming engaged, Green moved the two of them to the Plaza Hotel for a short time. Once Sylvia was married, though, Green went back to Hoboken. New York wanted to believe that the luxury there had swayed her: In 1909 year, the New York Times reported that Green was thinking of finally buying a proper Fifth Avenue property.

“The story was that Mrs. Green had again grow tired of her Hoboken flat…The new house was to cost $650,000," the paper reported. But it wasn't true: “Mrs. Green, in Hoboken last night, said she had no intention of moving to Fifth Avenue."








Hell Will Freeze Over Before We Agree on the World's Hottest Place

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Salt formations in Dallol, Ethiopia (Photo: Matej Hudovernik/shutterstock.com)

Much like the question of where the geographic center of the United States is, the specific point on Earth that reigns as the planet’s hottest turns out to be a very complex, loaded question.

For one thing, “hottest” isn’t as empirical as it sounds: do we mean the place that reaches the highest temperature? The place with the highest average temperature? Or do we factor in humidity to come up with a place that is the most unpleasant for humans, climate-wise? And where are we getting this data from? Is it even reliable?

Every one of those questions has an answer, and every one of those answers can be argued, although the answer is probably not going to be “my apartment in July” unless you live in one of the world’s most remote places. Instead of trying to crown an individual hottest place, we investigated all of the viable contenders. 

article-image Settlement in the Lut Desert, Iran (Photo: Julia Maudlin/flickr)

The highest temperature ever recorded was in the Lut Desert, in southeastern Iran, in 2005. But even that is sort of open to interpretation. For one thing, there are no weather stations in the Lut Desert, because why would there be? It is a horrible scorching salt desert. That means that the temperatures were noted with satellites, which have their limitations. They measure what’s called “land skin temperature,” basically the temperature on the Earth’s surface, instead of the air. 

Typical weather stations measure the temperature of the air a few feet above the surface, because it’s slightly more stable than the ground itself. The temperature of the ground is dependent on factors like color, texture, and windiness. Even the consistency of the surface makes a difference, whether it consists of large rocks or small pebbles or fine sand, or if it has shifted recently. Still, in 2005, satellites recorded the ground temperature in the Lut Desert at 159.3 degrees Fahrenheit. 

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Death Valley, as seen from Zabriskie Point (Photo: Andy Burton/flickr)

That shocking temperature pales in comparison with one recorded in 1972, in a part of Death Valley, California known as Furnace Creek. The area experienced the single highest ground temperature of all time: 201 degrees Fahrenheit. However, that’s not really considered indicative of the weather there; the Lut Desert measurement was an average over a large geographic area, not an exercise in finding say, the hottest rock, which is basically what happened in Furnace Creek.

Most sources will tell you that the hottest inhabited place on Earth is Dallol, an Ethiopian settlement in the Danakil Desert, which stretches across three countries in the Horn of Africa. It is, according to all accounts, pretty much hell. Many active volcanoes spurt molten rock without warning. The ground is made up of unearthly colors, yellows and reds and oranges and greens that bring to mind the planet Venus. It is extremely difficult to get to; an excellent Gadling article explains that you need to bring two jeeps (in case one melts) and an armed guard, because the Afar people, who mine salt from the desert, have been known to pose a hazard to visitors, according to the Ethiopian government. 

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Dallol, Ethiopia (Photo: Ji-Elle/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Dallol has the highest average annual temperature of any place on Earth, at 94 degrees Fahrenheit, but to call it a “town” is sort of misleading. At one point there were salt-mining operations there, but it’s now considered a ghost town, visited only by the Afar and the occasional extreme traveler.

For obvious reasons, most inhabited places have more reasonable climates. If we bump our requirements up to the hottest place on Earth with a population of more than 100,000, that, according to Christopher C. Burt of Weather Underground, is Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The holy pilgrimage site, which sees around two million visitors each year, has an average annual temperature of 87.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Since Mecca is a desert city, it’s a dry heat, so the next contender might feel even hotter thanks to its humidity. The award for the most sweltering major city goes to Bangkok, Thailand, which has over six million residents and an annual average temperature of 86.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course, that seems downright cool when compared to temperatures in Death Valley and the Danakil Desert. 

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The otherworldly landscape of Dallol, Ethiopia (Photo: Ji-Elle/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)








Inside the Surreal World of Berlin's Design Panoptikum

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 article-image(Photo: Anagoria/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Design Panoptikum, the “Museum of Extraordinary Objects,” is a collection of industrial objects curated in a very different way by owner and artist Vlad Korneev. The venue in Berlin, Germany, a self-described “space carnival atmosphere,” is where the whimsical meets the grotesque. Plastic bodies assembled from historical objects lounge on rare furniture and under lamps, jumbled amongst assorted medical equipment and surreal artwork.

All the items featured in the Museum were once part of normal life, but under Vlad’s unique vision, they become an industrial dreamscape. The focus is not on the objects’ original purpose or function; instead, they are reimagined through unexpected pairings. 

article-image(Photo: Anagoria/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

article-image(Photo: DesignPanoptikum)

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(Photo: Anagoria/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0

article-image(Photo: DesignPanoptikum) 

article-image (Photo: Anagoria/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0

On Obscura Day, May 30, join Vlad for a personal tour of the DesignPanoptikum in Berlin, Germany, and hear his stories about his creations. 









The Perfectly Preserved World War I Trench

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article-imageSanctuary Wood, Ypres, Belgium, where trenches have been preserved since World War One. (Photo: John Gomez/shutterstock.com)

The fields of Northern France and Belgium still bear many of the scars of last century’s Great War, but they are a faint reminder of battle carnage on the Western Front. After the Armistice, farmers returned to find their fields and villages totally destroyed by four years of trench warfare. Craters mark spots where artillery shells exploded but much of the area is now covered over with grass, hedgerows and forests. 

Except for one place.

In 1919, a Belgian farmer called Schier returned to his land on a hill over looking the ancient medieval city of Ypres, and simply left it as it was. Once part of the British front line, it lies there today looking much as it did a hundred years ago: a mess of rusted barbed wire, shell holes full of water, trees shattered by artillery fire and a system of trenches and tunnels filled with mud.

Still privately owned by the Schier family, it is one of the few sites in Flanders where you can experience something of the actual terrain suffered by soldiers during World War I. On British military maps, it was noted as Hill 62, for its elevation in feet above sea level. For the tens of thousands who lived and died here it was known as Sanctuary Wood. To go there now is to experience the horrors of life in the trenches for yourself.


 

article-imageLooking into the trenches. (Photo: Amanda Slater/flickr

The old medieval cloth manufacturing city of Ypres in Belgium looms large in the British psyche due to the amount of casualties suffered here. In the early stages of the war, Germany raced to the sea in an attempt to defeat France by attacking through Belgium. This strategy, known as the Schlieffen plan, drawn up years before the war started, would avoid the heavy French fortifications further south and seize Paris in a sweeping attack from the side. British made their stand to block Germany at Ypres. In a salient (a bit of battlefield in enemy territory) jutting out from the city both sides dug in trenches and for four years inflicted some of the bloodiest fighting of the Great War upon each other, in the now familiar pattern of minimal gains for massive casualties

The road leading to the British front lines from Ypres is today marked by one of the most somber of all war memorials, the Menin Gate. A colossal archway on a scale of the main concourse at Grand Central Station in New York, it is covered in the names of nearly 60,000 soldiers of the British Empire who died here. Standing underneath it, the names stretching beyond what the eye can see, it is unfailing moving. However, these are just the names of those who died with no known grave. They were simply swallowed up and disappeared in the fields surrounding Ypres. Every night at 8 p.m. a memorial service is held for the missing. No wonder British writer Siegfried Sassoon wrote of the memorial—"Here was the world’s worst wound."

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A view of Sanctuary Wood in September 1917. (Photo: Courtesy WW1 Cemeteries)

The identifiable dead are buried in countless cemeteries located in the Ypres Salient. Almost every copse and country lane features a meticulously tended graveyard, maintained by the Commonwealth Graves Commission. The largest, Tyne Cot, located on a ridge east of Ypres holds nearly 12,000 burials; Sanctuary Wood, a few miles to the south, has just over 600. Each head stone is immaculate, with the grass as neatly trimmed as a vicarage lawn, with memorial books present to help visiting relatives find a particular tombstone amongst the hundreds of thousands. 

But while the government-funded commission diligently tend their memorials, the privately-owned Sanctuary Wood is something of an anomaly. Entering the farm house through a cafe, the building was turned into a museum in 1919, and is filled with the rusted artifacts Shier found on his property. Rifles encrusted with mud, German steel helmets riddled with bullet holes, and a collection of period stereoscope photographs of the battlefield. Walking through the farmhouse into the back garden, past rolls of barbed wire and an alarming stockpile of German artillery shells, a wooden sign post indicates the way to the “British Front Line.” 


 

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Rusting war toys. (Photo: Luke Spencer) 

Climbing down into the ruins of the trenches, it is perhaps the only place left to physically understand the daily horrors of life on the Western Front. The flat lowlands of Flanders were particularly susceptible to flooding. The summer of 1917 saw some of the heaviest rainfalls recorded, and the Salient turned into a lethal quagmire of glutinous mud, constantly churned up by incessant shellfire. I visited Sanctuary Wood in the height of a dry summer and still the trenches were swamped with mud and rain. A hundred years later the wood still looked desolate, a nightmarish lunar landscape of craters, shattered tree stumps and barbed wire.

Working at London’s Imperial War Museum, historians Nigel Steel and Peter Hart started in the 1980s to collect firsthand accounts from those who lived and fought at Ypres.

 “It was a nightmare,” wrote Private William Collins of the Royal Army Medial Corps, “all you had was a couple of duckboards.....and either side of it was about ten feet of mud. If you fell off it would take a traction engine to pull you out.”

article-imageTunnels within the trenches. (Photo: Amanda Slater/flickr)

Sanctuary Wood was given its peaceful sounding name in the early days of the war, when the heavy woodland provided perfect cover for respite from German guns, and a place to treat the wounded. Within months though, the constant artillery bombardments turned the wood into a devastated nightmarish landscape. “Ironic to be called by such a peaceful name! - Can a wood be so called when that entire region is....desolate with huge holes, naked and burned, and reduced to shreds,” wrote Phillipe Bieler, a Canadian soldier who recorded his experiences of the front in his memoir Onward Dear Boys. 

Others had similar experiences. Private Alfred Warsop of the 1st Battalion Sherwood Foresters, wrote:

“I was sitting in a trench, soaked to the skin. I had to change position as the side of the trench was slowly sinking being only made of wet mud... The conditions were abysmal enough without the ever present dangers of shellfire, trench raiding parties, poison gas attacks and raking machine guns....There was a flash in the sky. I realized with a shock that I had been badly hit. My right arm jumped up on its own and flopped down. It felt as if my left arm and part of my chest had been blown clear away.”

The preserved trenches at Sanctuary Wood, however, have been controversial. As a privately owned property, the old British front line isn’t protected by the watchful eye of the Commonwealth Grave Commission. All over Northern France and Belgium, farmers and construction workers still regularly find remnants of the Great War, everything from unexploded artillery shells to rusted live hand grenades. The so-called Iron Harvest in 2013 alone unearthed over 160 tons of deadly artifacts. In fact there were so many recovered shells that the Belgian government created a daily pick up service where farmers could leave their deadly discoveries by the side of the road to be picked up, and safely delivered to a specialist bomb disposal service in Poelkapelle. Since the end of the war, over 260 people have been killed by disturbing unexploded bombs around Ypres alone, most recently in 2014 when two construction workers accidentally detonated a 100-year-old shell. accidentally detonated a 100-year-old shell.

article-imageA 1917 aerial view shows the ruins of the Belgian town of Ypres, which was situated near to Sanctuary Wood. Ypres was at the centre of some of the most intense battles of World War One. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

 It’s also commonplace for farmers and construction workers to unearth more gruesome finds. One such was on an industrial site in the village of Boezinge, just outside Ypres, where work was being done on the Ypres-Izer canal. Here in 1992 a section of the British front line was discovered, along with the remains of 155 soldiers. When such a discovery is made the Commonwealth Graves Commission is called in to see if the remains can be identified. A team of archaeologists known as "The Diggers" then go to work to unearth and preserve the site. The continual discovery of remnants from the war are treated with archaeological respect for the site and for those who died there.

Apart from official stewardship, then, Sanctuary Woods’ caretakers have turned what is essentially a memorial site into a living museum. At some point, the Shier family re-enforced the trench walls with now rusting corrugated iron to stop them collapsing. Looking at primary sources, the majority of trenches would have been brevetted with wooden planks and lined with sandbags. But this kind of work highlights the argument about the historic site’s care: Is the family desecrating a battlefield or preserving it? As one World War I battlefield touring guide puts it, “The natural desire to be allowed to walk freely amongst historical remains such as these trenches is one side of the argument, the possibility that they will be damaged in so doing is another.”

article-imagePart of the interior of the Menin Gate, Ypres, where every night at 8 p.m. a memorial service is held. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

But what Sanctuary Wood does is to enable the visitor with a visceral first-person experience of what it was like to descend into the earth, to slog through mud-filled trenches and avoid being ensnared on rusted barbed wire. In the early 1980s part of Sanctuary Wood collapsed to reveal an undiscovered system of tunnels. Built by the Royal Engineers, it is possible today to walk inside. Such is the rudimentary nature of the living museum that there are no flashlights provided: You enter at your own risk. By the pale light of my phone, I entered the narrow claustrophobic tunnels. Only 4 feet high, and filled with mud, water in some places, rising to uneven dry earth floors, the feeling of finding your way deep underground is claustrophobic in the extreme. These tunnels would have provided protective communication passages between the trenches. For the miners tunneling towards the Germans, dozens of feet below, the suffocating terror must have been imaginable.

For war poet Wilfried Owen the demoralizing effects of trench life under fire left men;

“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.”

While the officially sanctioned Menin Gate and countless surrounding cemeteries and war memorials poignantly speak to the vast loss of life at Ypres, visiting the preserved ruins of the old British front line at Sanctuary Wood is to descend first hand into the wretched misery of trench life on the Western Front. Where soldiers rapidly became, as Siegfried Sassoon described in his 1917 poem Dreamers,“citizens of death’s grey land.”

“I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,

And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain.

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats.

And mocked by hopeless longing to regain

Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,

And going to the office in the train.”  

 

 

 

 








Found: A Bomb That Forced the Biggest Evacuation in Cologne Since 1945

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A plane over Cologne in WWII (Photo: 418th Bomber Sqaudron/Jodi Womack/Flickr)

Today, in Cologne, Germany, 20,000 people had to evacuate the city after a one-ton bomb from World War II was unearthed at a construction site. Anyone living within half a mile of the site where it was found had to evacuate; a nearby zoo was closed as well. All this added up to, the BBC reports, "the city's largest post-war evacuation."

During World War II, Cologne was regularly bombed—the Allies ran more than a thousand sorties against the city and dropped tens of thousands metric tons of bombs down from the sky. In 1942, in one night, the Royal Air Force sent 1,000 bombers to drop 1,500 tons of bombs on the city. By the end of the war, the population had shrunk from more than 750,000 to about 40,000 people.

It's not at all unusual to find unexploded bombs in Germany. In 2011, the largest bomb disposal operation since 1945 dealt with two 1.8 ton bombs in Koblenz, where half the city's population had to evacuate. This past November, 17,000 people were evacuated from the city of Dortmund when another 1.8 ton bomb was found. And in December, 10,000 people had to evacuate their homes near Berlin after a bomb was found near a main railway station. All told, there are thought to be 3,000 unexploded bombs around Berlin and 250,000 across the country, waiting to be discovered and, assuming everything goes right, diffused.

Bonus finds: the Viceroy of Ireland's stash of tiaras and other ceremonial jewels, a prehistoric beaver

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 








Places You Can No Longer Go: Webb's City

The War on Pinball

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On Obscura Day, May 30, join us for a private tour and play session at the Pacific Pinball Museum. (Photo by Michael Moore on Wikipedia)

In an age of Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and fantasy games where sex is a major subquest, it seems hard to believe that pinball was once the scourge of America’s youth.

But in the 1940s and for decades after, the pinging, zinging, flicking, bumping game of pinball was considered by many to be both a moral and economic stain on America’s proud cultural quilt.

To get the story of the war on pinball we spoke with Michael Schiess, Executive Director of the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, California, who has been collecting and repairing pinball machines, both modern and vintage, since 2001.  

Descended from a table game known as Bagatelle, the first pinball machine was patented in 1871, after a plunger mechanism that rocketed the ball into the playing field was added to the game. By the 1930s, pinball machines were ubiquitous amusements in bars and taverns around the country, and were seen as “trade stimulators,” a boon to the bleak economy of the Great Depression.  

Before the invention of flippers, which were not introduced until 1947, the launched ball would simply bounce off pins into whichever random hole it found on the field. Despite the random, uncontrollable nature of the game, people still placed wagers on the outcome of these games, and pinball soon gained a reputation as a gambling machine that catered to lowlifes. This reputation was bolstered by the fact that most of the machines came from Chicago, then a hub of mob activity, and the cash-based machines were easy targets for criminals.

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On Obscura Day, May 30, join us for a private tour and play session at the Pacific Pinball Museum. (Photo: Kevin Wong on Flickr)

This gamified source of ill-gotten gain soon attracted the attention of crusading do-gooders who set out to put a stop to the pinball epidemic, eventually leading to the game being banned in a number of cities, most notably New York. Chief among the opponents of pinball was then Mayor of New York City, Fiorella LaGuardia, who succeeded in passing a citywide ban on the machines in 1942 with the help of some nationalistic furor.

By 1942 [LaGuardia] had been trying to ban pinball and a lot of illegal activities in New York. He was trying to clean up New York, so I think he was using anything he could get his hands on,” Schiess explains.

He got most of his ammo when Pearl Harbor was bombed. They needed materials and resources for the war effort, and pinball of course used wood, wire, metal, glass, all these resources that were required for the war. Once he had that ammunition, he was able to enact a law to make [pinball] illegal.

With LaGuardia leading the charge to have the game banned and eliminated, places like Oakland, California and Chicago, where most of the machines were manufactured, followed suit and created laws banning or limiting the use of pinball machines. Even with the laws in place, the game was never completely eliminated. The new legal restrictions on the game quickly quashed the use of the machines as gambling tools, with many of the games being set up so that you could not “win” per se, but instead competed for the chance at an extra game.

Even as its more unsavory connection to gambling dissipated in the 1950s, the nationwide attitude towards pinball retained the finger-wagging tenor of a moral crusade. Newspaper articles were written and advertisements were created that denounced pinball as “taking lunch money from our kids,” as Schiess puts it. The arguments sounded remarkably similar to many of the alarmist arguments against video games that continue to be espoused even today.

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On Obscura Day, May 30, join us for a private tour and play session at the Pacific Pinball Museum. (Photo by the rabbit on Flickr)

As the years passed, pinball machines continued to pop up around the country in various forms as the furor against them lessened and the laws and bans became more lax. Yet it was not until 1976 that the New York pinball ban was actually lifted.

“The way I understand it, some of the pinball manufacturers were lobbying to get the ban lifted, because people were playing pinball in New York,” says Schiess.

The canny lobbyists brought an actual pinball machine into a city council meeting, where the pinball historian Roger Sharpe gave a demonstration of how it worked:

"The ban was lifted when Roger Sharpe went in and did a Babe Ruth number where he called his shot, and then he launched his ball. This was after several attempts to prove to them that he could actually beat the machine,” Schiess explains. “But they weren’t buying it until he made that shot. As soon as he made it they took a vote and the ban was lifted. It was a big deal.             

With a single, successfully landed flipper shot (and several back-up pinball machines on stand-by in case the main one malfunctioned), Sharpe proved to the city council, and the nation-at-large, that pinball was in fact a game of skill and not just a tool of iniquity for hoodlums and rock-and-rollers. After New York City lifted their official prohibition on the game, many other cities followed suit, and pinball quickly returned to prominence.

Pinball machines grew ever more complex in the decades that followed, with media-licensed machines becoming the norm, adding more and more digital bells and whistles in a losing race to compete with the rise of video games. Yet remnants of pinball’s days as the bad boy of amusements still remain. As Schiess tells it, pinball was still banned in Oakland right up until 2014. The law prohibiting it was rediscovered and abolished during research regarding an online gambling law.

By the late 2000s pinball had become a beloved, but increasingly rare amusement, with all but one of the major manufacturers (Stern being the remaining company) having gone out of business. The days when pinball was a symbol of gangsters and greasers were finished, only to be replaced by a warm nostalgia for the jangling tangibility of the cacophonous game.  


On Obscura Day, May 30, join us for a private tour and play session at the Pacific Pinball Museum, which has a fine collection of vintage pinball machines. 








The Spy Who Billed Me

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article-image(Photo: Photick/shutterstock.com)

In 1961, when a KGB counterintelligence officer showed up at a CIA station in Helsinki, Jeanne Vertefeuille held the keys to the office safe. "Responsibility for office funds was part of my normal administrative duties," the former CIA officer writes in Circle of Treason, the book she co-authored in 2013, "and therefore I could get into the strongbox where we kept our money."

The intelligence officer and his family needed to get out of the country, fast, and they needed money for the plane tickets and travel expenses. "I immediately drove to the office, opened the strongbox, pulled out wads of currency without counting, and then proceeded as fast as I could to the airport," Vertefeuille writes. She sped to the airport, where she met the defecting officer and the CIA station chief, handed them the money, and sent them on their way to the United States.

Her takeaway, as a bureaucrat? "Needless to say," she writes, "my accountings did not balance that month."

Like every other business, clandestine operations have a budget and like every federal agency, that budget is examined by scores of government workers. But how do expenses work if you're a spy, doing secret work?

Much like other kinds of work, it turns out, with a few key differences. The nature of the business might mean that unexpected expenses come up and not all can be documented with receipts. But the people holding the purse strings back in the seat of government do want to know what the tax dollars they've committed are being spent on.

"We were very conscious of being accountable. These were taxpayer funds. They weren't to be spent frivolously," says Peter Earnest, a former CIA operations officer who's now the executive director of the International Spy Museum. "And that was enforced by a pretty bureaucratic accounting process."


 

article-imageTime-delay pencils and detonation device, created for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), c. 1943-1945. The OSS was a wartime intelligence agency and a predecessor for the CIA. (Photo: Courtesy of the International Spy Museum)  

 

It might be incongruous to think of spies having to account for expenses, like any old suit on a business trip, but in reality, people working for intelligence services do have to keep track of the money they're spending, file expense reports, and even hound their company (the Company, in this case) to reimburse them. "They're the same as the reports any businessman would submit after meeting a client," says Chris Lynch, former FBI and CIA counterintelligence officer and author of The C.I Desk. "Meals, miles, parking, small gifts, other expenses, receipts if they had them, some kind of 'certification' if they didn’t."

Information about expense reports for intelligence operations is somewhat hard to come by, both because it's mundane and potentially revealing. Spy memoirs don't spend a lot of time recalling the hours spent on filling out paperwork, but, on the other hand, boring paperwork, if it included line-by-line accountings of expenses, could show how an officer operates—and how lavishly he or she spends. The expenses for setting up an operation might include sourcing equipment, creating supply caches, arranging safe houses, and training people; one court case in Italy revealed records of U.S. intelligence officers staying at luxury hotels and spending as much as $500 a day eating out.

But some of the most intriguing expenses that intelligence operations rack up come from the requests of agents—the well-placed people that intelligence officers recruit to secretly pass along valuable information. Some agents simply want to be paid for their efforts. But some have much more unusual requests. 

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Eyeglasses with a concealed cyanide pill designed for CIA agents, c. 1975-77 (Photo: Courtesy of the International Spy Museum)

One of the main tasks of a case officer out in the field is to identify people who might be valuable assets, gain their trust, and convince them to clandestinely collect and share information. Often, this work starts with socializing. Cost might include: booze, food, and other enticements (pornography, in some places).

In his memoir, A Spy for All Seasons, Duane Clarridge, a former CIA officer who led the Latin American and European divisions, walks through the recruitment of a source. Clarridge identifies a possible agent, a man he calls Adamski. Since he's having trouble meeting up with Adamski, Clarridge starts by taking a mutual acquaintance for lunch and asking for help connecting. Clarridge doesn't pay this mutual friend—"I knew that any mention of compensation would be offensive to him," he writes—but he does give him small gifts. While trying to stage "accidental" meetings with Adamski, Clarridge rents a fishing boat, travels to a nearby tourist town, buys a gift (a piece of embroidery) for Adamski's wife, and helps him procure an abortion drug. Eventually, all these efforts led to Adamski agreeing to become an agent.

Recruiting agents, for Clarridge, was "addicting," he writes. But not all case officers relish this process. "As a general rule, case officers do not spend enough on cultivating agent candidates or liaison officials," Joseph Wippl, a former case officer who now teaches at Boston University, says. And, according to Clarridge, officers spending might depend, in part, on what they get out of it: "When case officers can't afford to go to lunch or dinner on their own because it's too expensive, they know they can still go out for a nice meal on Uncle Sam, since part of the business of developing somebody is taking him out for dinner," he writes. As bureau chief in Rome, Clarridge saw developmental activity go up when the dollar was weak—and drop again when the currency rallied.


 

article-imageThe entrance to the KGB Headquarters in Moscow (Photo: Multimotyl/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)  

Once an officer has recruited an agent, the question of compensation comes up. Agents have all sorts of motivations: sometimes they simply want or need money. But sometimes they have more complicated requests. In Clarridge's story, Adamski asks for ancient Greek coins, for a collection (although, as time passes, it becomes clearer that he's likely selling them off as a source of income). In other memoirs, CIA employees remember agents asking for wristwatches, crystal glassware, and pearls. Sometimes agents request items that are hard to come by where they live—sports equipment, for instance, from fishhooks, wading boots, and hand warmers to shotguns and ammunition. Agents might ask for toys for their kids, books, the latest gadgets, or prescriptions to hard-to-find medications. One agent asked for large quantities of ballpoint pens, which he was supposed to procure for his Soviet government office: he essentially just outsourced the task to the CIA.

These expenses had to be accounted for, too—even if they were simply cash payments.

"When I gave [an agent] their monthly stipend or whatever it was, they would sign for it,"  using a previously agreed upon name, says Earnest, the Spy Museum director. "I would have to submit that." 

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A CIA lighter from the 1970s that double as a camera (Photo: Courtesy of the International Spy Museum)

Besides this sort of work with agents, intelligence agencies like the CIA also run missions, and the expenses for those are bigger and less commonly seen on your average travel expense report. In his memoir, former CIA director William Colby describes the expenses of trying to influence, relatively early in the CIA's history, the outcome of an Italian election: The CIA handed over money to local political groups to publish propaganda, organizes rallies, and run voter registration campaigns. This added up. "Considering the amounts of money we were spending—at least relative to the CIA budget—it is not surprising that there was an almost constant demand by Washington for accountings on what we were accomplishing," he wrote. "There were many at headquarters who were suspicious that all we were doing was handing out our money in a free-wheeling happy-go-lucky way." And some operations, of course, involve even more serious expenditures, on, for instance, guns, ammunitions, and other military resources.

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The headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service in London (Photo: Jim Bowen/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

All these expenditures could be subject to internal auditing, and there is oversight. One director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield Turner, wrote that he defined certain kinds of actions that to be cleared with him: "payments to agents when they exceed certain dollar amounts; recruitments of foreign agents at Cabinet level or above; dispensing any lethal material…any operation where the risks were high and exposure could seriously embarrass the United States."

And, as Colby found, there wasn't much tolerance in Washington for flexible budgeting. "Once," he wrote, "I had been indiscreet enough to reply to a question about an item in a Southeast Asia appropriation that it was a 'slush fund' to meet future needs…the fund was eliminated from my budget by the examiner."

Of course, not all intelligence agencies necessarily operate the same way. Harvey Klehr, an Emory history professor who's studied the KGB, says that "in the 1930s and 1940s, there are occasional requests for more money—one KGB officer in LA asked for permission to buy a car, since no one in LA walked—but no indications that anyone filled out an expense report." The Comintern headquarters did want its employees to account for how their funds were spent, though. And Klehr says, when the KGB's predecessor agency found out it had been paying money to made up informants, it started requiring that more than one intelligence officer work with each source.

But, even more than people working in less sensitive operations, intelligence officers have a reason to responsibly report their expenses. "Another thing to keep in mind is: people in the clandestine service are periodically polygraphed," says Earnest. "And there are questions on there designed to uncover the fact that you had misused funds. That’s something the average citizen doesn’t go through."

 








Sprucing Up the Pine Box: Inside Ghana's Novelty Coffin Industry

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article-imageThe Kane Kwei Coffins workshop in Teshie, Accra has been creating and selling fantasy coffins since the 1980s (All photos: Angelica Calabrese)

The workshop of one of the most well-known fantasy coffin carvers in the world is squeezed between a barbershop and a clothing store, in the shadow of a three-story Melcom supermarket. In front of the workshop, children skitter through the dirt and women sell fried yam, cell phone credit, and balls of fermented corn mash called kenkey. A generator’s incessant hum fills the air, alongside the echoing calls of the passing tro-tros and the ubiquitous tune of high-life music. Above the shop, a faded wooden fish hangs above a plank with “KANE KWEI COFFINS” painted in black block letters. Inside, Eric Adjetey Anang and his carpenters are spearheading the creation of Ghana’s most fascinating and internationally renowned artistic product: abebuu adekai, or fantasy coffins.

Abebuu adekai, meaning “proverbial coffins” in the language of the Ga ethnic group, are coffins that tell a story. They are designed to represent the life of the deceased person, often referencing his or her work, dreams, and even vices. Perhaps a writer might want to be accompanied to the afterworld in a coffin-sized replica of her favorite pen; a hairdresser, inside her trusty blow dryer. An bartender might instead choose a bottle of his favorite whiskey. If you can dream it, Eric Adjetey Anang and his apprentices can craft it. And if they can’t, one of the many other workshops in the surrounding area surely can.

On a sticky Friday afternoon, I braved the Accra traffic to venture to Teshie to visit Eric Adjetey Anang at the Kane Kwei Coffins workshop. Sitting between an eight-foot long green lobster, a human-sized guitar, and a towering bottle of Paradise talc powder, Anang took a break from coffin construction to chat with me about the past, present, and future of his coffin-carving craft.

article-imageEric Adjetey-Anang and a Paradise bottle coffin. This bottle was designed as an art piece, rather than for burial.


In Ghana, funerals have always been an occasion for both mourning and celebration. In many of the traditional religions, people believed that dead ancestors could powerfully impact the lives of the living, and elaborate funeral ceremonies and celebrations ensured the goodwill of the recently passed. Chiefs and religious leaders merited additional consideration: scholars say that occasionally, chiefs were buried in the carved wooden palanquins upon which they had been carried during their reign.

Fantasy coffins gained popularity among the Ga people of the Greater Accra region through the craftsmanship of Anang’s grandfather, Seth Kane Kwei, in the mid-twentieth century. The coffins were traditionally envisioned to represent the lives and livelihoods of those whom they carried to the grave — for example, a fish for a fisherman and a hammer for a carpenter.

According to Anang, Seth Kane Kwei’s first coffin innovation was born from this tradition. Sometime in the 1940s, Kane Kwei convinced the family of a recently deceased chief to bury the chief in his palanquin rather than rushing to craft a standard wooden coffin in the few days before the body began to decay. The carved palanquin would have otherwise just rotted above ground, he argued; why not send it below with its revered owner?

Some years later, in the mid-1950s, Kane Kwei’s grandmother passed away. Accra’s Kotoka International Airport had recently been built a few miles away, and the old lady had loved watching the planes arrive and depart over their Teshie fishing community. In homage to her dream of one day flying in an airplane, Kane Kwei built her an airplane-shaped coffin that would fly her comfortably into the next life.

This was the first time that a carved coffin had been crafted for someone other than a chief or community leader. But as more people learned of his creations, interest grew. The Ga fishermen of the surrounding area began to commission their own fantasy coffins, in the shape of colorful fish or traditional boats. Kane Kwei’s entrepreneurial spirit helped grow the business, and in 1980, he opened the shop that his grandson still runs today.

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A lobster coffin in the process of being painted.

By 1992, when Kane Kwei passed away, his Ghanaian fantasy coffins had achieved international acclaim. They had been featured at Magiciens de la Terre, a contemporary art exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1989, and subsequently gained a circle of committed collectors. In the years following his death, his sons Cedi and Soa, notable apprentices like Paa Joe, and his grandson Eric Adjetey Anang, have carried on the tradition.

As Anang tells me of the fish he recently constructed with a mouth full of trash and of an ear of corn whose auction price of $3,000 will fund the construction of a dam in Ghana’s Upper West region, it is clear that he has inherited his grandfather’s spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. “I’m trying to work on things that have something to say about the community,” he tells me. He and his fellow artisans are transforming the craft first practiced in his grandfather’s small community into an ever more globalized art form.


 As a young man, Anang chose to pursue coffin carpentry rather than university studies, having recognized the form’s potential and appeal early on, when collectors and journalists would show up at his grandfather’s workshop, eager to learn more. Today, Anang recounts his upcoming travel plans to the United States and Denmark, and past trips to Senegal and Siberia. He says that today, coffins from the Kane Kwei workshop are on display in the Seattle Art Museum, San Francisco’s deYoung Museum, the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston, the Museum of Death in St. Petersburg, Russia, along with many private galleries.

There are even a few individuals who’ve gotten so excited about Anang’s work that they’ve commissioned their own designer coffins. A few years ago, a man from Delaware requested a coffin in the shape of a Leinenkugel Beer bottle, and shipped one of his old bottles all the way to Accra to ensure that the design was accurate. More recently, an aquarium owner in Florida requested a seahorse.

But these coffins, designed for export and exhibition and made with hard woods and strong glues to weather temperature and time, differ vastly from the intentionally transient pieces crafted for traditional use in Ghana. Of the roughly 300 coffins that the workshop produces per year, only about 20% are for export; the remaining 80% are used for traditional funeral ceremonies in Ghana.

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A stool coffin for a chief, and a sneaker-shaped coffin for an avid footballer.


At the workshop, Anang shows me the coffins his current apprentices are working on. Lean, young, and dressed in colorful secondhand clothes plastered with nonsensical phrases, they chatter in Ga as they plane and sand the soft sugar pine. Sawdust thickens the air as we wander towards the pieces currently under construction, all for burial in Ghana: a football sneaker and two stool-shaped coffins that represent the power and authority of a chief. While the exported coffins cost between $1500 and $3000, these coffins cost around 2000 Ghana cedi ($500).

This is a steep price for the average Ghanaian. Not every family is willing to pay so much, though many find creative ways to foot the bill – after all, it’s just one among a suite of funeral expenses that can cost families anywhere from $3,000 to $20,000. Politicians and religious leaders have critiqued the immense amount of money that goes into funeral celebrations, but families continue to spend, often delaying the funeral for up to two months in order to raise the money to cover all of the expenses — not only paying for the body’s spot in the mortuary, but also for posters, chairs and tents, speakers, food, musical groups, and the fantasy coffin itself.

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Coffins featured in the Kane Kwei workshop

The months spent fundraising and planning for the funeral give carpenters the chance to create their coffins; in fact, it might even be said that electricity and refrigeration have allowed the craft to flourish. A cocoa pod design, one of the most popular, can take as short as a week to build, whereas a more challenging and innovative request may take up to a few months.

However, even if the coffin is ready, sometimes the family is not, for reasons related to finances, politics, or other issues. “Sometimes the body is kept in the morgue for a year, or two, or more. This coffin has been here for two years,“ Anang says, pointing over my shoulder to a dusty, half-complete, stool-shaped coffin sitting in the workshop area, “and the body is still in the mortuary.”


The thriving funeral industry in Ghana makes coffin-carving an attractive job for many young men who might otherwise pursue farming, fishing, or traditional carpentry. Faced with slim prospects in their home villages, many come to Accra seeking a better future – and those with artistic skills, intelligence, and entrepreneurial spirit can have great success.

Kpakpa Adotey, who runs Eric Carpentry Shop in Labadi, was one of these young men. He came to Accra with only a primary school education and began an apprenticeship with Paa Joe, one of Seth Kane Kwei’s first apprentices. Adotey has now opened up his own shop, where he draws inspiration from the traditional coffin concepts to craft everything from funeral urns to jewelry boxes for sale at local tourist markets. Adotey’s shop is one of about four workshops specialized in the production of fantasy coffins in the Greater Accra region, and all of the carpenters speak with pride about the work that they do and the opportunities it has offered them.

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Adotey with a bottle of Star beer and a Kalyppo juice box. Both are intended to be used as cabinets.

“I’m proud of what I’m doing now, because I know a lot of people who are professors, doctors, but they haven’t met the Chancellor of Germany,” Adotey tells me, eyes sparkling. Last year, his workshop was destroyed by a storm, so we sit and chat in broken plastic chairs under a makeshift tarp where he completes his current commissions. “She came here,” he says of Angela Merkel, waving his arm to indicate the gray and sun-bleached courtyard, his neighbor’s laundry drying in the hot breeze. “I had a thirty minute chat with her, I shook her hand,” he says.

Daniel Mensah, of Hello Design Coffins in Teshie, has a similar perspective. “If you see some of my friends, now they don’t have a job to do. But this job is a great job,” he tells me,. Inside his breezy but rickety second-story showroom just down the street from the Kane Kwei shop, there are coffins shaped like lions, eagles, ice cream tubs, blow-dryers, pineapples, bottles of Coca-Cola and beer, and even a Canon camera.

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A lion, eagle, and blow-dryer coffin in Mensah's second-story showroom. Only chiefs can be buried in lion and eagle coffins. 

 While many of the household goods, furniture, and electronics sold in Ghanaian shops are imported from elsewhere, the fantasy coffins remain the unique domain of skilled artists. Sitting shirtless in his courtyard workshop, with his children running through his feet, Mensah supervises his two apprentices as they use their fingertips to carefully spread filler into the cracks between the wood of a coffin shaped like the pestles used to pound Ghana’s most famous dish, fufu. “Not all carpenters can do this work. It’s great, it’s famous, it’s happy for me,” he says.

These fascinating pieces that merge traditional craft and contemporary art offer a glimpse into regional history and culture, into the fantasies of Ghanaians, and all the fans who have sought out abebuu adekai, coffins that tell a story, from near and far. 

On Obscura Day, May 30, join us for an open house at the Kane Kwei Coffin Workshop in Accra, Ghana.

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A young apprentice at work in the Kane Kwei carpentry workshop.
 








FOUND: The Jawbones of a Never-Before-Seen Species of Early Human

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Very, very old teeth. (Photo: Yohannes Haile-Selassie)

In the vicinity of three million years ago, in what's now Ethiopia, there lived some two-legged apes that were going through some very strange changes—they were becoming more like us. This is the area of the world where the famous fossil Lucy was found. Now, in the same neighborhood, scientists have discovered the bones of what they think is a separate species of hominin.

They named this species Australopithcus deyrimeda. Its bones were found essentially around the corner from Lucy—about a day's walk, National Geographic reports. These new fossils include part of an upper jaw and two lower jaws. The key differences that the team of scientists that analyzed them found are in the teeth—they're smaller than other fossils' and, in particular, the canine teeth are small, indicating that these hominins might have had a distinct diet. 

The team, which published their results in Nature, argues that that differences between these and other fossils are too stark to roll up these hominins with previously identified species. But, it's something of a judgment call: as a scientist not involved in the work told National Geographic, "the distinctions are very, very subtle."

Essentially, we keep finding these little bits and pieces of human-like creatures and trying to imagine what their world was like—and how they might have seen each other. Of course, the windows of time in which we know these species lived are wide—hundreds of thousands of years. But however subtle the differences between the fossils, it's becoming harder and harder to argue for a linear and teleological history of human development. It's looking like the human history that we have to piece together from shards of bones was just as messy as our present day world.

Bonus finds: A new species of early humans, the second longest insect in the worlda 300-year-old box of tea

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 









Surreal South America: Modernist Photography from the 1930s

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article-image'Soapsuds', ringl + pit (Photo: © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

The photographers Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola met at Germany’s rigorous Bauhaus school in 1932, a year before the avant-garde architecture and design institution was pressured into closing by the Nazis. After the influential movement was dissolved, the young couple moved to London, and then on to Coppola’s homeland of Argentina.

This was the beginning of a fruitful artistic partnership that lasted until they divorced in 1943—and the photos are gloriously weird. 

The newlyweds weren’t in Buenos Aires very long before they decided to put on Argentina’s first modernist photography exhibition. Coppola shot moody, sometimes surreal, images of streetscapes in the Argentine capital, while Stern created stylishly witty photo collages, and shot striking portraits of writers like Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges.

The first major exhibition of the works of Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It includes more than 300 of their works, starting with their individual artistic careers in the 1920s and continuing through to the 1950s. Below, a selection of the pair’s glamorous modernist photographs. 

article-imageBuenos Aires 1936, Horacio Coppola (Photo: © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

article-image'Photomontage for Madí, Ramos Mejía, Argentina', 1946–47, Grete Stern (Photo: © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/ Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

article-image'4800 Avenida Díaz Vélez' 1936, Horacio Coppola (Photo: © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/ Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

article-image'Columbus’s Egg' 1930, ringl + pit  (Photo:  © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/ Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York) 

article-image'Calle Florida' 1936, Horacio Coppola (Photo: © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York) 

article-image'Self-Portrait' 1943, Grete Stern (Photo: © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York)  

article-image Jorge Luis Borges 1951, Grete Stern (Photo: © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York)  

article-image'Komol' 1931 ringly + pit (Photo: © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

article-imageBuenos Aires 1931, Horacio Coppola (Photo: © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

article-image'Dream No. 28: Love Without Illusion' 1951, Grete Stern (Photo:  © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

article-image'Plaza San Martín from Kavanagh' 1936, Horacio Coppola (Photo: © 2015 Estate of Horacio Coppola/The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

 








Corpse Brides and Ghost Grooms: A Guide to Marrying the Dead

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(Photo: Boston Public Library/Flickr)

So you want to marry a ghost.

In some societies, it's possible—with a few caveats. Posthumous marriage—that is, nuptials in which one or both members of the couple are dead—is an established practice in China, Japan, Sudan, France, and even the United States, among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The procedural and legal nuances of each approach vary wildly between cultures, but here is an overview of how to tie the knot with someone who isn't quite alive.

China: Skewed Sex Ratios and Grave Robbery  
Although Chinese dating and marriage practices are slowly changing under the influence of technology and online dating, traditional, family-oriented values still rule. Matchmaking, via meddling parents and/or a marriage broker, is big business. To be female and unmarried at 30 is to be a “leftover woman.”

The 1978 implementation of the one-child policy has complicated the marriage market somewhat due to the societal preference for baby boys. A 2011 study found that the sex ratio among newborns rose from 105 males per 100 females in 1980 to over 120 males per 100 females during the 2000s. This skewed ratio has resulted in an overabundance of single men.

According to Chinese custom, older sons ought to marry before their younger brothers. If an older brother should die unmarried at a young age, however, there is a solution that keeps the social order intact: ghost marriage. In China, and among the Chinese in Taiwan and Singapore, ghost marriages are performed to address a variety of social and spiritual ills. Chief among these are the desire to placate the restless spirits of those who go to their grave unmarried. “Ghosts with families are liable to direct their discontent within the family circle,” writes Diana Martin in Chinese Ghost Marriage, “and it is here that ghost marriage becomes operative.”

A family whose son or daughter has died at a young age may come to believe that the deceased person is communicating a desire to be wed. This message can take the form of a spirit wreaking general havoc on the family, such as causing illnesses that do not respond to conventional treatments. A restless bachelor ghost may also express his desire to be married by appearing in a family member's dream or while being channeled through a spirit medium during a séance.

Most ghost marriages are conducted to unite the spirits of two departed souls, rather than wedding a dead person to a living one. Though it may seem harmless to conduct a postmortem ritual designed to make two ghosts happy, the practice of matchmaking dead men with worthy ghost brides has occasionally resulted in criminal depravity. In March 2013, four men in northern China were sentenced to prison for exhuming the corpses of 10 women and selling them as ghost brides to the families of deceased, unmarried men. The women's bodies were intended to be buried alongside the dead men, ensuring eternal companionship.

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The groom in a Chinese ghost marriage. (Photo: Destinyweddingstudio/shutterstock.com)

For deceased women, ghost marriage offers social and spiritual advantages in China's patrilineal society. A woman who dies single, without having had children, has no-one to worship her memory or tend to her spirit. According to Chinese tradition, a dead woman cannot be memorialized within her family's home. Her spirit tablet (a memorial to a dead person that is displayed in a home altar that honors the family ancestors) is forbidden from being placed among the family in which she grew up. A deceased married women, by contrast, gets to have her spirit tablet put on display in her husband's home. Ghost marriage, therefore, ensures that a woman's spirit can be worshipped by bringing her into the family of a husband who has been chosen for her after her death.

If a heterosexual couple is engaged, and the man dies before the wedding, the woman can engage in a ghost marriage by marrying her fiancé's spirit. During the ceremony, a white rooster stands in for the groom. According to Lucas J. Schwartze in Grave Vows: A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Varying forms of Ghost Marriage among Five Societies, the bird also rides in the bridal carriage post-ceremony and thereafter accompanies the bride to formal dealings with the groom's family. Such cases are rare due to the requirements placed on the bride, who must then move in with her dead husband's family and take a vow of celibacy. 

Whether it involves a live person or not, ghost marriage is not legal in China—NBC News reports that it was outlawed during the reign of Chairman Mao—but the ritual endures, particularly in the northern regions of the country.

Japan: Darling Dolls for the Afterlife
In her 2001 article “Buy Me a Bride”: Death and Exchange in Northern Japanese Bride‐Doll Marriage, Ellen Schattschneider sums up the philosophy behind ghost marriage in Japan:

“Persons who die early harbor resentment toward the living. Denied the sexual and emotional fulfillment of marriage and procreation, they often seek to torment their more fortunate living relatives through illness, financial misfortune, or spirit possession. Spirit marriage, allowing a ritual completion of the life cycle, placates the dead spirit and turns its malevolent attention away from the living.”

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A traditional Japanese doll. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The main factor distinguishing Japanese ghost marriage from its Chinese counterpart is the incorporation of non-human spouses. A deceased person is not married to a dead person, nor to a living one, but to a doll. The most common ghost marriage is between ghost man and bride doll, but ghost women are occasionally united with tiny, inanimate grooms.

According to Schattschneider, Chinese-style ghost marriage, between a living woman and deceased man, formerly took place in Japan, but was replaced in the 1930s by man-doll marriage. (This shift happened due to an increase in young, single men dying during war and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The high number of casualties made it too difficult to find enough live brides for them all.)

During a bride doll wedding ceremony, a photo of the dead man is placed in a glass case alongside the doll to represent their union. The tableau stays in place for up to 30 years, at which point the man’s spirit is considered to have passed into the next realm. The symbolic companionship is designed to keep the ghost husband calm and prevent him from causing unrest within his living family.

France: A Legal Option for the Bereaved and Betrothed
France is the rare country in which it is explicitly legal for a living person to marry a dead one. Article 171 of the French civil code—the laws by which the country is governed—states that "the President of the Republic may, for grave reasons, authorize the celebration of the marriage where one of the future spouses is dead.” 

Naturally, there are caveats: the living person must prove that the couple intended to marry, and has to obtain permission to wed from the deceased’s family. If the president chooses to grant the wedding request, the marriage becomes retroactive from the day before the deceased person’s death. The living spouse does not receive the right to intestate succession—that is, they do not acquire the dead person's assets or property. But if a woman is pregnant at the time of her partner’s death, the child, when born, is considered an heir to the deceased.

Though the civil codes of France were introduced during Napoleon’s reign, the article enabling postmortem matrimony is a relatively recent addition. The story behind the addition begins with a disaster: on December 2, 1959, the Malpasset Dam just north of the French Riviera collapsed, unleashing a furious wall of water that killed 423 people. When then president Charles de Gaulle visited the devastated site, a bereaved woman, Irène Jodard, pleaded to be allowed to marry her dead fiancé. On December 31, French parliament passed the law permitting posthumous marriage.

Hundreds of grieving French fiancées have since married their departed sweethearts. (And that’s "fiancées" with two Es—a study of French posthumous marriages that were granted between 1960 and 1992 found that, of the 1654 wedding requests, almost 95 per cent came from women.)

Posthumous marriages continue to be granted in France, usually under heartbreaking circumstances. In 2009, 26-year-old Magali Jaskiewicz married her deceased fiancé and father of her two children Jonathan George, who died at 25 in a car accident two days after asking her to marry him. 

Sudan: Weddings in the Wake of Fatal Feuds  
Within the Nuer ethnic group of southern Sudan, ghost marriage happens in a very particular way. “If a man dies without male heirs, a kinsman frequently marries a wife to the dead man’s name,” writes Alice Singer in Marriage Payments and the Exchange of People. “The genitor [biological father] then behaves socially like the husband, but the ghost is considered the pater [legal father].”

In other words, the woman marries a living man, who stands in for the dead one. Any offspring, while biologically fathered by the living husband, are considered to be descendants of the dead man.

This arrangement, which often is carried out when a Nuer man dies in a feud, is conducted in order to secure both the property and ongoing lineage of the dead man. The woman receives a payment at the time of the ghost marriage—a fee known as the brideprice—which may include "bloodwealth" money from those responsible for the death of the man as well as payment in the form of cattle that once belonged to the deceased man. In this way, Nuer posthumous marriages maintain the social order by redistributing wealth and property.  

Mormonism: Marriage by Proxy
According to the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, marriage is eternal and death is but a blip. Matrimony, known as “sealing” in Mormonism, binds a couple to one another for the rest of their lives and beyond, provided that both spouses conduct themselves according to the LDS interpretation of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

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The Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah (Photo: Rockworth/shutterstock.com)

The Mormon belief that marriage is eternal allows for a wedding ceremony to be performed on those who have already died, in a manner similar to posthumous Mormon baptisms. These proxy sealing ceremonies, which take place in an LDS temple, are intended to be initiated only by the descendants of those concerned. But as Max Perry Mueller wrote in a 2012 Slate article, that's not always the case. Mueller detailed the case of Thomas Jefferson and one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. Neither were Mormon during their lifetimes. They were also not married. But in the eyes of the LDS church, they are now sealed to one another for eternity, having been both posthumously baptized and posthumously wed. 








The World's Only Monument To A Horrible Destructive Pest Is In Alabama

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The Boll Weevil Monument in Enterprise, Alabama (Photo: Library of Congress) 

In Enterprise, Alabama, there is a statue unlike any other in the entire world: A 13-foot woman in Grecian-style robes holding up . . . a giant bug. The Boll Weevil Monument reigns as the only monument to an agricultural pest on Earth, for obvious reasons. Why would anyone want to honor a blight? Especially one that destroyed thousands of farms throughout the Americas? 

 

 article-imageThe Alabama Historical Association marker for the Boll Weevil Monument, with the Monument in the background to the right. (Photo: TampAGS/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

But there's no irony to the Boll Weevil Monument, since the town is legitimately grateful to the ferocious little bug.

The boll weevil, a very small variety of beetle, is native to Mexico, and nests in the boll–or seed capsule–of cotton, hence its name. With its distinctive long snout, the boll weevil is a legendary pest, one of the all-time greats on the list of most feared insects of the agricultural world. It moves where the cotton grows, and migrated across the Rio Grande from Mexico into Texas as soon as the land there had decent cotton fields for it to feed on, in 1892. It moves quickly; the beetle is a decent long-distance flier, and individual beetles have been found as far as 150 miles away from where they were tagged. By 1909, the boll weevil had landed in Alabama.

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A boll weevil up close (Photo: Leong9655/shutterstock.com)

By 1915, the incorrigible weevil had made its way all the way to Enterprise, a small city near the state's southern border. In Coffee County, where Enterprise sits, almost 60% of the cotton crop was destroyed that year. The weevil is extremely difficult to expel; farmers tried spraying with absurd amounts of pesticides, but the weevil quickly developed an immunity to the poison. Within a few years, farmers were losing entire crops to the weevils. Nothing was working. In fact, coupled with the Great Depression just over a decade later, the boll weevil very nearly destroyed the entire South.  

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An illustration from a 1910 Farmer's Bulletin, produced by the United States Department of Agriculture. Part of the USDA's education program was an effort to raise farmers' awareness and knowledge of the boll weevil and how it could harm their crops (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

But not in Enterprise. Other areas that relied on cotton attempted to fight the boll weevil with hardly any success until the early 1980s, when a federal program to eradicate them began to make some headway. (Today they use pheromone traps, which mostly work.) Yet Enterprise, and the rest of Coffee County, decided to hell with cotton!

Cotton is full of weevils. Know what's not full of weevils? Peanuts. 

Alabama has a perfect climate for growing peanuts–Dothan, a town not far from Enterprise, claims the title of "Peanut Capital of the World." And the early 1900s were a fine time to begin growing the beloved legume: peanuts were mostly ignored in the U.S. until the late 1800s, when P.T. Barnum began selling them at the circus. At the turn of the century, an array of new machines for planting, harvesting, and shelling peanuts were invented, and in 1915, George Washington Carver began his crusade on behalf of the crop. Enterprise began growing peanuts just after the weevils arrived, and by 1917, Coffee County was the leading producer of peanuts in the entire country. 

article-imageThe nearby town of Dothan, Alabama, named the 'Peanut Capital of the World', has various forms of peanuts depicted all around town. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

The switch from cotton to peanuts is credited not just with saving the town from destruction by weevils, but also for introducing a level of prosperity that was new to in Enterprise. On December 11, 1919, the town unveiled a beautiful, earnest statue in honor of the boll weevil, for forcing the town to abandon one crop and adopt a far better one. Initially, the statue was just a Grecian-looking woman raising her hands above her head, but 30 years later, in 1949, a boll weevil was added on a pedestal atop her hands. 

For some reasons, the statue was the victim of frequent vandalism; it was damaged beyond repair in 1998. A replica was made and stands in its place, while the original stands in the Pea River Historical & Genealogical Society, a museum dedicated to preserving the history of Enterprise.

Update, 5/29: An earlier version of the story incorrectly noted the nearest state to Enterprise, Alabama. It's Florida, not Louisiana. We regret the error. 








FOUND: A Gun Linked to 7 Murders Was Sitting in a British Museum

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This is an example of a VZ58 rifle, which Irish paramilitaries were supplied with. (Photo: Wikimedia)

In February 1992, Protestant paramilitaries killed 5 people in a betting shop in Belfast. The VZ58 rifle later connected to those murders was also linked to two killings in 1988. The people who committed these murders were never found, but the weapon has been—it was sitting in the Imperial War Museum, the BBC reports.

The families of the 1992 victims were told by the police that the gun has been “disposed” of. But recently investigators on a “Historical Enquiries Team” tried to track it down—and they found it on display in London.

There’s always been some suspicion that police were involved, at least indirectly, in the 1992 attack. The museum received the gun from the Royal Ulster Constabulary Weapons and Explosives Research Center and was told that it “could have been used in ‘specific events,’” according to the BBC. But the museum didn’t have any information about what those events might be. The gun’s been removed from display and sent for furthering testing.

Bonus finds: A diamond ring lost for 30 years, a sacred Spanish necklace lost for 300 yearssnails

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 








#ObscuraDay Rolling Round-Up

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Obscura Day 2015 has arrived!

We've been working diligently at Atlas Obscura for months, compiling unique and wondrous locations around the world and dreaming up unusual events in a widespread call for our readers to unite on a single, glorious day in an international celebration of curiosity and discovery. That day is finally here, and thousands of people across the globe have signed up to participate in 150+ Obscura Day events taking place in more than 35 states and 30 countries. From seeking out the lost Oracle of Dionysus in Bulgaria to tracking the hidden waterways of the the world's longest cave, learning falconry in the desert of Southern California to attending an intimate concert inside a Norwegian mausoleum, this year's lineup of Obscura Day events is sure to inspire your sense of wonder.

Follow our adventures through out the day and share your own with us as well—the more we explore, the more we uncover a world full of incredible things just waiting to be discovered, be they across an ocean or around the corner! Check back all day as we update this post with your adventures.

10:02 a.m.

It's finally here! We had some excitement in the office in the run-up, as a few celebrities (hi Pee-wee!) tweeted out support. But mostly, we are excited to see what people get up to. For instance, I had no idea about this. 

And in Germany, they were just setting up:

Even cats wanted to come!



In England, there were some lovely cemetery sightings:



10:16 a.m.

So true



Some fascinating tidbits from trip inside the invite-only Explorer's Club

 

And then, in Switzerland, some bones were examined:

 

New Jersey, of course, was full of clowns:

 

10:38 a.m.

Now it feels like Obscura Day has really gotten started—as some tours in different time zones have already happened (Australia began around midnight EST), some are beginning. Like the one in D.C. led by our CEO, David Plotz. 



Lots of educating happening.



And as I sit in my living room, a real case of FOMO has set in. The Roman catacombs, for instance, look pretty great.

 

11:15 a.m. 

Things are getting pretty real over at New York's Explorer's Club.

 

11:33 a.m.

Meanwhile, over in Oslo, Chris Pettersen and co. are getting to check out the weird death-egg of Emanuel Vigeland in the Vigeland Mausoleum.

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11:40 a.m. 

Eat your heart out House of Cards! On Obscura Day we actually tour the underbelly of Washington DC!

 

12:00 p.m.

One of our favorite Muffler Men in all of America is getting some rainy Obscura Day love!

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12:15 p.m.

OMG FALCON TIME WITH FALCON FORCE!

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12:21 p.m.

We've all learned not to bury anything in a pet cemetery, but touring one is totally fascinating.

 

 

12:42 p.m.

Let it never be said the curious of Massachusetts will miss an opportunity to tour a castle.

 

12:50 p.m.

Our very own Rachel Doyle has discovered the cavernous majesty of the Brooklyn Army Terminal.

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12:57 p.m.

This clown found on our private tour of the Morris Museum in New Jersey is making fun of everyone who isn't there.

 

1:01 p.m.

Jay Morgan's enthusiasm for the Capitol Stones pretty much sums up how we feel about the wonders of the world.

 

2:15 p.m.

The bottle art homage to the Virgin of Guadalupe, at Randyland in Los Angeles, is beautiful! 

 

From the inside looking out #randyland #obscuraday

A photo posted by Krystal Boehlert (@kboehlert) on








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